Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Staunton, August 31 – The sudden
incapacitation or death of Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov has sparked three
kinds of speculation, one about who will succeed him, a second about what any
transition will mean for Uzbekistan and Central Asia, and a third about what
similar successions in other post-Soviet dictatorships will bring.

The third kind of speculation, one
not focused on the murky world of Tashkent politics, is likely to prove the most
interesting and instructive, as evidenced by a commentary offered by Ilya
Milshtein about what Russia and the world might expect when Vladimir Putin
passes from the scene (graniru.org/opinion/milshtein/m.254172.html).

“Russia without Putin is an
unthinkable country, a house without a master, a city condemned,” the Moscow
commentator says because in the minds of a majority of Russians, “without Putin
there is no Russia;” and so it is “strange even to imagine” what the country once
was and will be at some point again “without Putin”

Karimov’s
sudden demise, Milshtein suggests, has prompted many Russians to think the
unthinkable and led some like blogger Mitya Aleshkovsky to suggest that contemplation
of such a future is “terrifying” (twitter.com/aleshru/status/770350376151289857).
Not
surprisingly, this has highlighted the existence of two Russias, a minority
that looks forward to that day and a majority that fears it, and forced each to
consider the existence of the other.

Indeed, Milshtein says, the
discussion about a Russia without Putin has meant that “almost everyone immediately
and forever has forgotten about the Uzbeks and Karimov,” often forgetting that
what happens will depend not only on how Putin departs the scene but also on
the nature of the population that will be left behind.

Will Putin leave “in the Karimov way
or like Stalin, according to Avtorkhanov, or as a result of a softer palace
coup, or simply be pensioned off, freeing up the throne for some final
successor and begin to act in the manner of Deng Xiaoping?”These are very different scenarios and they
will have very different outcomes.

One reason Russians are focusing on
the Karimov precedent is that they cannot imagine any other outcome. At some
point, Putin will die; and only then will there be “a Russian Federation
without VVP.”But the existence of the
other variants needs to be considered by those expressing either hopes or
fears.

How the elite left behind reacts
will matter a lot, Milshtein says.After
Stalin, those left behind wanted to guarantee that they wouldn’t ever again
have to live under a Stalin. After Brezhnev, the elites having aged alongside
him simply waited to die – or in a few cases, they thought about the radical transformation
of the country.

“After Putin will remain a mixed group
of elites who in an extremely conditional manner can be divided between the
party of money and the party of blood,” although that schema “does not explain
anything by itself” because no one knows at a time of universal lies and
distrust who is a “secret” liberal and who is not.

Only one thing seems clear: “all of
them will want to live as they did under Vladimir Vladimirovich, but they are
hardly likely going to be able to agree on how to do that.” The liberals don’t
have the forces on their side and may attract siloviki by corrupt means, while
the siloviki may use their own resources to win out.

“This conflict threatens Russia with
the kind of shocks that even Stolypin did not guess about,” the commentator
says.

And that means that the question of
the foreign policy course of a post-Putin Russia remains completely beyond
anyone’s ability now to predict.It
simply isn’t the case that the liberals will always be for peace and the siloviki
for war. Some liberals will undoubtedly want a liberal empire, and some
siloviki won’t want to risk destruction in a nuclear war.

But it is not only the elites that matter in
this case, Milshtein suggests, given that “after Putin the vaunted ‘Putin
majority’ will remain.” And they may prove to be the basis for the kind of
fascist state that Aleshkovsky says could happen. This majority created by
Putin may end up determining Russia’s fate even more than he has.

“In the final analysis,” the
commentator continues, “a besieged fortress is not a metaphor but a condition
of the soul, one that exists independently of what an individual thinks about
the Kremlin, Crimea, Ukraine, Europe and America.”And that provides the basis for thinking a
post-Putin Russia may be truly horrific.

But however that may be, a
post-Putin Russia will eventually happen just as a post-Karimov Uzbekistan now
appears to be beginning. It is useful to think about it, Milshtein says, as
long as one is not distracted from the far more important if depressing tasks
of thinking about “what to do today and tomorrow.”

Staunton, August 31 – The major
military exercise Vladimir Putin announced earlier and that has sparked
concerns that it is a preparation for a new military move against Ukraine
concludes today (topwar.ru/99985-sosredotachivayuschayasya-rossiya.html),
raising new questions about what the Kremlin leader intends and will do next.

In normal military operations, the
journalists come only after the troops; but in Putin’s “hybrid” war which has
made propaganda a centerpiece of his operations, the reverse has often been
true; and that makes this new report by Dmitry Tymchuk worrisome, albeit not
definitive as to what the Kremlin will do next.

Indeed, as Russian commentator
Vataly Shchigeltsky points out, what Putin is doing may have far more to do
with domestic Russian conditions than with any plans to attack. As he writes, “there
is no war but there are all the conditions of wartime,” something that generates
patriotic fervor and support for the leader (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=57C54A1B48C5A).

“Talk about a possible war in the
near future seems empty,” he says. “There is no reason to attack Russia, a
country which is rapidly being destroyed by the hands of its very own ‘elite.’
And it is senseless for Russia to go on the attack,” given its defeats and the
price it is paying for them.

But the Russian elite has a
compelling reason to gin up wartime emotions: It is only way it can “extend”
its rule by justifying in the minds of its own members and the Russian
population at large the self-imposed isolation of the country from the outside
world, “following the behests of Antonio Salazar,” the Portuguese fascist
leader.

Staunton, August 31 – In the most
disturbing indication yet that Kremlin-sponsored xenophobia will ultimately go
to what has been its default setting in Russia and become anti-Semitism, a
Russian court in Vologda oblast, at the request of prosecutors, has
“liquidated” the local Jewish community, sparking fears among many and delight
among Russian anti-Semites.

This action comes only a few days
after a meeting of European rabbis in Moscow declared that there was no
anti-Semitism in Russia and that the Jewish communities in that country were
experiencing an unprecedented rebirth (interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=64225).

The human rights monitor “The New
Chronicle of Current Events” provides the fullest coverage of what happened in Vologda
yesterday (ixtc.org/2016/08/cherepovtse-zapretili-evreev/). In an article
with the headline, “They’re banning Jews in Cherepovets,” it says the court’s
action was ‘the first case of its kind in the history of present-day Russia.”

Officials of Russia’s justice
ministry called on the Cherepovets court to disband the Jewish community there
for what it said were violations of registration rules concerning its location.
The court made its ruling without providing additional details (interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=64223).

But Interfax added that one of its
sources in Vologda said that the Jewish community was accused of failing to
show the necessary respect for the Russian authorities because it had failed to
respond when officials informed it that the community was in violation of the
law. Because of the court’s action, the community will no longer have
registration and the right to function.

Members of the Jewish community in
Cherepovets said that they had recently received anonymous threats and had
handed them over to the FSB’s local office, but that the latter had not done
anything that they could see.Then Irina
Nechayeva, head of the Cherepovets administration’s office for work with social
organizations, said that the Jewish community had failed to take part in
city-organized Subbotniki.

Of course, as the leaders of the community
pointed out, Jewish law precludes the participation of Jews in such actions on
Saturdays.